In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani was declared the Mayor Elect of New York City, following a resounding electoral victory. The self-declared democratic socialist (and member of both the Democratic and Democratic Socialists of America parties) won the election with 50.4% of the vote, 6.2% more than his main electoral rival independent (and former Governor of New York state) Andrew Cuomo. Following his victory, Mamdani had a simple four-word message for President Trump, telling him to ‘Turn the volume up’ as he declared he had received a mandate for change.
With Mamdani winning 5 out of the 6 boroughs in New York, what does his mandate for change look like and who stood against him to push for a different vision for New York? Zohran Mamdani, originally born in Uganda and the son of an academic and an acclaimed film maker, started his professional life in New York as a housing counsellor. This saw him help low-income households fight evictions.
In 2020 he was elected as a state assembly member for the 36th District. An early sign of his grassroots approach as an assembly member was when he took part in a taxi driver hunger strike, fighting for debt relief, which they achieved. In October 2024 Mamdani announced his intention to stand as New York Mayor.
Throughout his campaign, his policies had a consistent objective of achieving social justice, through the tackling of the affordability crisis. His policy pledges include: free citywide bus services; rent freezes to alleviate the cost of living; city owned grocery stores to help affordability; and his aim to triple production of union-built housing. Zohran states he can raise $5bn in revenue for these projects through the raising of corporation tax on the top 1%.
It is in large part thanks to these policy promises and his mobilisation of voters through social media that he has been elected the first Muslim- American mayor of New York. While Mr Mamdani’s victory is impressive, it would be remiss to ignore the other two candidates who together received 48.7% of the vote share, so who are they and what did they stand for? Mamdani’s biggest rival throughout the campaign was independent Andrew Cuomo, who received 41.6% of the vote.
At first glance, Andrew Cuomo has an impressive CV with 4 years as Attorney General and 10 years as Governor of New York. However, Democratic Party members didn’t believe this was enough to choose him as the Democrat candidate, possibly due to the controversial end to his term as governor. This saw him resign after the Attorney General found him guilty of sexually harassing 11 women in the workplace.
This led to Cuomo losing the Democrat primary by 13 points to Mamdani and being forced to stand as an independent. As an independent though, Cuomo gained the endorsement of President Trump, and he stood on a platform of tax relief for lowand middle-income families and the recruitment of 5000 new NYPD officers. However, despite Trump’s endorsement, Cuomo still also faced Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa.
Sliwa is the founder of the Guardian Angels group (made up of unarmed volunteers who fight crime in New York) and stood on a platform of a fulltime subway crime force being established, the implementation of ‘efficiency savings’ and increased SEND support in schools. Although both candidates’ policies did resonate with just less than half of New Yorkers, it still was not enough to stop Madani (who Trump called a ‘Communist’ becoming Mayor Elect. Mamdani will be sworn in as Mayor in January, and it appears his grassroots campaign has inspired several European leftists to study and learn from his success.
French, British and German left-wing parties have sent representatives to study his media strategy on the ground. This leaves the question: is the Mamdani style of campaign the future of the lefts approach to elections? Only time will tell.